Roger Hilsman

Roger Hilsman (23 November 1919-23 February 2014) was Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs from 9 May 1963 to 15 March 1964, succeeding W. Averell Harriman and preceding William Bundy.

Biography
Roger Hilsman was born in Waco, Texas in 1919, and he grew up in Minneapolis, the Philippines, and Sacramento. He graduated from West Point in 1943 and fought as a US Army lieutenant in Southeast Asia during World War II, fighting behind Japanese lines in Burma. During the 1960s, Hilsman became an aide and advisor to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, supporting the escalation of the Vietnam War. In August 1963, he was contacted by South Vietnamese ARVN generals who sought the US government's blessing for a military coup, and Hilsman gained Kennedy's approval to provide tacit support to them, as Kennedy had mistakenly assumed that the rest of his cabinet had agreed to the plan before Hilsman contacted him. The 1963 South Vietnamese coup occurred on 1-2 November 1963, and President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu were both killed and replaced by a military junta. In 1964, he left office due to his opposition to operations in North Vietnam, arguing that they would not assist the struggle against communism in the South; Johnson's administration supported an aerial campaign over North Vietnam in Operation Rolling Thunder. From 1964 to 1990, Hilsman taught at Columbia University, and he failed in a 1972 bid for the US House of Representatives in Connecticut. He died in 2014.